Popsmacked!: So much more than pre-fab

Tossed together in a bid to capitalize on Beatlemania, The Monkees really did come out on top

Davy Jones

Dolenz

Monkees logo

We all knew Whitney Houston was going to die — all those cancelled appearances, rumours of drug abuse and tabloid exposes. It was just a matter of time.

For the same reasons, we knew Amy Winehouse wasn’t long for this world, years before she kicked the bucket last July from the usual celebrity vices.

And don’t get me started on Michael Jackson, a once triumphant superstar hobbled by allegations of sexual abuse, personal peccadilloes and a conspicuous lack of great music in the last decade and a half of his life.

But who knew Davy Jones — the diminutive Monkees frontman, the guy who sang Daydream Believer — was a candidate for the grim reaper until it was announced the 66-year-old former teen idol had passed away Wednesday from a heart attack?

Not me. Like most of the boomers and Gen-Xers who grew up watching The Monkees on TV, he was frozen in my mind — probably forever — as a perpetually boyish 22-year-old who seduced girls with his suave British accent and everyone else with his charming impishness.

The guy who accompanied Marcia Brady to her high school prom, was satirically introduced by David Letterman as “the world’s greatest tambourine player,” whose jerky, side-to-side dance moves influenced, of all people, Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose.

Jeez, if anyone was going to die, I would have thought it would be Peter Tork, the band’s doofus bass player, who ranked No. 22 on deathlist.net’s 2010 chart after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer (relax, he’s in remission).

But nope, it was perky, five-foot-four Davy, the lone Brit in a band of American actors-turned-musicians and musicians-turned-actors brought together in a corporate attempt to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of The Beatles.

It wouldn’t be an easy ride.

When their self-titled sitcom — about four wacky musicians trying to make it — debuted in the fall of ’66, the band became an easy target for hipster critics, who condescendingly referred to them as the “pre-fab four” and wrote them off as manufactured puppets who neither wrote their own songs nor played their own instruments.

I was six when the show premiered, and let me tell you, it didn’t matter.

With its absurd storylines and farcical chaos, The Monkees was like the Marx Brothers on acid, a perfect synthesis of innocence and anarchy that may not have appealed to diehard Beatles fans — by this point donning love beads and priming pot pipes — but was exactly what my mother needed to keep me out of her hair for its 30-minute running time.

As luck and happenstance would have it, there were a lot of kids like me — the early ‘60s, in fact, were the peak years of the baby boom — and together we ensured that, through sheer demographic influence, whatever we liked would be around forever.

And so it was with the Monkees, who enjoyed a bigger year in ’67 than the Beatles — four No. 1 albums and the top-charting American single, I’m A Believer — before their show was cancelled a year later and they faded away from overexposure.

And then something weird happened.

In the two decade gap between their acrimonious split and the triumphant ’86 reunion tour that saw them catapult back in the spotlight, The Monkees became, if not hip, exactly, then retro-cool, generating the kind of buzz most acts only dream about.

How did this happen?

• MikeNesmithputhisfistthroughawall.

The Monkees will play their own instruments! he informed stuffed shirt record execs sometime between the second and third albums. Pre-fab? BAM! “That could have been your face!”

This — American Idol contestants, please take note — was the kind of punk attitude that endeared them to the Sex Pistols, who recorded a cover of (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone a decade later and gave The Monkees street cred up the wazoo.

• Theirsongswereactually,gulp,good.

No, not good — great, penned by industry pros like Neil Diamond, Carole King and Harry Nilsson, with Pleasant Valley Sunday, I’m A Believer and Daydream Believer standing as shiny nuggets from pop’s golden age.

• TheywerethefirstTVvideoband.

And when MTV began airing Monkees reruns in ‘86, a whole new generation twigged to their zany pioneering antics, sparking a second round of Monkeemania that surprised even diehard fans.

A lot of it, of course, had to do with Jones. Yes, Mickey sang most of the hits, but lovable, self-deprecating Davy was always the band’s heart and soul.

“The Monkees were very, very successful,‘’ he told me before a Kitchener appearance at the now defunct Lulu’s Roadhouse in 1992. “It was one of the most successful bands of all time and still one of the most successful television shows, if not the most successful television show of the ‘60s.

“And those kids watching it now, they know The Monkees more than they know The Beatles. There’s nothing for them to see The Beatles in. All they hear is in the elevators — muzak — or an oldies station playing I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

“But The Monkees are right there in front of them. The Monkees are bigger in 1992 than The Beatles are.”

Jones, to my surprise, was far from the typical self-involved pop star: intelligent, insightful and gracious about his gifts as a performer, without a trace of envy or arrogance.

He was also — poignantly, in retrospect — aware of the distance between then and now, the way audiences perceived him, and that, talent be damned, all he really had to do was show up.

“People don’t go to places (like Lulu’s) to heckle,’’ he noted without resentment. “They don’t go there to test the entertainer. Those people going specifically to see Davy Jones won’t see any faults in Davy Jones. They don’t want to pick holes. They’ll want to listen to the songs they remember.

“And Davy Jones — in the eyes of the people who saw the show 25 years ago — won’t look any different than he did then.”

Did it bother him, this relentless telescoping of his life into a two-year span in his 20s when The Monkees could do no wrong?

“My little kid (then aged four) was watching the show the other day and I pointed to myself and said ‘Who’s that?’’ recalled the pint-sized pop star, who in recent years took to introducing himself, whimsically, as “Davy Jones’ dad.’’

“And she said, ‘That’s my other Daddy.’ So basically that’s the way I look at it. That was me, and that was it. It’s just another piece of memorabilia.”

Another piece of memorabilia? Perhaps. But without the loquacious Englishman, one that will never be the same.